Feedback on Ad Farm Post - Part 2

Feedback on the 12th September post on Ad Farming.

I applaud you on your decision, but one question I had in the previous thread...

If someone places a vendor on the land just to circumvent the rules, will this be restricted?

This seems to cover most of the concerns about ad networks. The current proposal sounds like a much more feasible method of regulating things and a little more fair on the side of advertisers. And it clearly states non-networked advertising on your personal land (for a store, etc) is not included in the regulation, so that bit should be settled too.

Landcutting while not directly addressed this time around, the post does say it will be dealt with in the future if things don't improve. So personally, all my immediate concerns are covered. Nice work.

In the midst of all the thank-yous, there are still some points that deserve clarification. I hope you won't hold it against me that I hold off on the "yayzeramas" for a bit.. I'd like to hear a couple of answers first.



1. How will these rules deal with "kitten cubes".. "smiley cubes" and other variants that are not actually "advertising"?

You say that this policy applies to "this land is for sale" signs, (which need not be networked at all, nor is it really an advertisement per say, it's more of "business signage".. but you don't say anything about those people who just remove the blockbuster-video ad and replace it with a lolcat.

At which point does something stop being an advertisement, and just become "a sign?" and at what point does it stop being a sign, and start being "a build?" this is probably the most important issue in this new ruleset. There is clearly a threshold where someone is rezzing art, rather than advertising.

You see, here's the issue. If I created a build that I considered to be "artistic in nature".. let's say that it was a monolith from 2001. 1mx4mx9m. Black, low-shiny... some glow, some particle effects making it shine and look awesome, as it floated above the ground. What insulates that build as a "object of art" rather than something that is in violation? Okay fine.. no ad. Now, what if I take that same monolith and place an animated batman on it? If you rule that this also is not an ad, let's take it a step further. What if I place upon that monolith, a scan of a 1904 sears catalog page, displaying horse buggies for sale? What if it's a political notice that says "Vote for Obama?" what if it's a lolcat that says "Voat 4 ObamaCat?". While the talking heads at LL may not beleive this is an idssue, I respectfully diagree. At what point does a prim stop being an expression of creativity that is exempt from judgement, and start being in violation?

I ask.. because those same land extorters that used "advertising" as an excuse... are already switching over to lolcats as we speak, and will now be calling their towers "art".

Is simply removing the advertising-texture going to be enough to avoid the wrath of LL? What recourse will people have against objects which are not technically "advertisements" but are still a nuisance? And at what point does the land owner's/artist's rights come into play, to build what they want to, on land they allegedly "own", regardless of what their neighbors think?



2. There has been at least one documented case already, where LL has issued a warning to someone for them to remove their ads.. on land which contained no advertising. We have seen lands seized, under the guise of advertising abuse.. where no advertising was going on.

What process are you planning to put in place, to make sure that seized land can be successfully appealed, and RETURNED to it's proper owner?



3. Another issue has now been brought up. You say that a person can't own more than 50 spaces, and that they can't use a group to get around this. What is to keep 50 people from collectively using their 50 spaces each, to place 2500 networked ad kiosks? And why precisely can't they use a group?


4. What if a person owned their full 50 parcels, trying to do business within the letter of the law.. and then a group they belonged to for other reasons (renting a space in a mall perhaps), owned 50 ad parcels someplace? Is the person forbidden to be a part of that group at all? or are they just forbidden to donate tier to that group?

Thank you. This is much appreciate to us who own land on the mainland and have seen it devalue because of tacky ad farmers.

Question:

Now that you have set a policy. What are the steps to alert you of violators in our sims and when will they be remove/banned?

Please detail the steps for land owners (and others).

Thanks.

Very, very, very happy day.

Thank you.

"Adverts should extend no higher than 8m from the ground."

Thank you God! Santa Claus! Whoever! OH, JACK!

THANK YOU, JACK!

coco

I know this was written in a manner that allows LL to adjust the wording as needed when finding people trying to circumvent the rules, but I do see some that will push the limits and attempt it. They will state that "their solution was not specifically addressed, so it should be allowed and no punishment issued". When warned and asked to take it down, they will try the next loophole on their list.

There needs, at least, to be a something added in writing that punishes those that keep attempting to find loopholes to the restrictions.

-- one loophole I see right now is the ground height restriction... I can see them raising their 16sq/m up to the limit (well above surrounding land) before adding their sign. --

I agree with the policy quite well. However, I do have one question: Why PG-Only? I know of some vendors setup on small parcels by a major in-world magazine, that is not PG. However, they're not obtrusive and are often near areas related to the content, albeit sometimes a bit distantly so. At any rate, it's always a mature area; not just a mature sim, but with mature content in the parcels around.

So, by this policy, would those be illegal, simply for being mature content?

A suggestion I made in the previous thread would have a specific setting in the "LAND" menu that would set land to "advertising" use.. and disallow terraforming, AND revert it to LL standard.

The post was /346/78/280361/21.html#post2137692

At the risk of being repetitive, I'll repost it here since it received little comment in the original thread.
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I'll also repeat my offer. I have designed a prototype bulletin board that I am offering to Linden Labs as one of many possible "standard" boards.

I also suggested a design contest for bulletin boards that would be the ONLY boards allowed to be used for networked advertising. These boards would be accessible in the build menu, ONLY on land set to advertising use. The complete text of my suggestion is below.

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Nice to see some clarifications, Jack!

In some ways I'm disappointed ot see the change in policy away from licensing. I suspect some will very quickly find ways to circumvent the 50 per avatar rule, or will use ALTs very creatively. I think there may well still be work to be done.



Thanks for these, really. This takes out a lot of the annoyance factor of these ads. Now to see these change.

@Starfire and Winter: It's just not possible for us to define a policy to cover every situation, but what I think you should ask yourself is what any other estate manager would do if he or she felt that something on their estate was having a significantly negative impact. Regardless of guidelines and rules, if something is badly affecting the Mainland experience then we will take action. Of course we will be as consistent as we can be, and provide guidelines where we can.

@Seann: Good question. I would suggest waiting until October 1st has gone by, and then if something clearly violating this policy appears, that you abuse report it. Bear in mind that we'll have our hands full for a week or two cleaning up, but we'll get there.


Jack

Another question.. What about a large billboard on my large parcel? How much land do I have to own in a sim, before I can build a themed billboard in the outdoors, over 8m above the ground? What if I've built a city in the sky? What if the ground is 20m under water?

I know that when you crafted these rules, you were concerning yourselves with "ad towers" primarily. But I can show you an example of a rooftop billboard, the BOTTOM of which starts at 10m above the ground.

If that billboard shows the name of the store it's on top of, it's exempt.. I assume that also means that it's exempt if it displays an image/ad relating to products for sale AT that store.

For that matter, I have a couple of banners hanging in front of my store in Healy. These banners are 10m tall (roughly) and are at least 8m above the ground level at their bottoms. The banners are displaying "ads" for an avatar sold in that shop. Are these banners in violation?

Since the Lab can't really tell who is an alt of who due to the tools used by the type of people that are ad farmers to begin with (IP spoofing, griefing tools, so-called "shooped life", etc) There will be no change.The ad farmers will simply create 1,000 accounts, that is totally impossible for Linden Lab to detect, to get 50,000 signs. Perhaps advertisers need to verify identity the hard way with a notarized affidavit, Driver's License, Passport, copy of 2 utility bills, etc., for each and every advertiser account. Otherwise you will never know who is who. I look forward to your future clarification and extremely aggressive and difficult to navigate process for being allowed to place an advertisement on the Mainland.

Now the next thing you need to do is set a +/- 3 standard deviation one month moving window on land prices for parcels under 512 sq meters. Starting with dead center at L$7 per meter and the initial window extending to +/- 3L$. Any prices below the lower limit are ignored but are applied to the moving average. However the land price for small "micro parcels" could not be set above the top end of the moving average window.

This would effectively and permanently end land extortion in a fair and equitable manner. People that own these parcels do not have to sell if they don't want to sell at these prices. This would not even remotely impact land sales overall as this is limited to micro parcels. Since it will not impact the market in any way you could alternatively just set a flat maximum price for parcels under 512 at 7L$ per sq meter and be done with it. That can be hard coded into the back end. Complete and permanent end to the entire issue of land extortion without having to deal with policy and abuse reports. Now there is a company cost saver idea.

Good stuff, Jack!

Thank you!!

Thank you Jack, it is an excellent set of guidelines for ads. I am still concerned about land cutting and extortion by people who have nothing to do with advertising though. They have evolved many annoying tactics, such as cutting a 64 m parcel off the end of an original 512 parcel, setting the 448 m piece at about the average market rate and the 64 m piece at a very high price. I hope that this practice and others like it will fall solidly into the category of "negative impact on the Mainland experience". Keep up the great work.

How are you going to distinguish between advertiser and land owner in making your decisions about TOS violation? It seems to me that you are assuming the land owner and the advertiser are the same account, which means the rules can be circumvented. Unless you feel the bit about "Use of Alt accounts/groups to circumvent this restriction will be considered a violation." is sufficient.

Something like the following would give us a great deal more comfort.

"Advertising systems designed to circumvent the intent of the TOS will be declaired as being in violation and subject to the same treatment."

Jack, good to see you working on this and responding to our comments!

An initial disappointment - started out by "network advertising is to be forbidden" and now its "ok if you only have 50". I would have preferred the licensing strategy by auction, and in new sims only. But, having said that, its still an improvement.

I like the 8 meter height constraint, but I do wish you would also disallow full bright. Oh and yeah, love the bit about "land for sale" signs being included - these will now have to limit themselves to 8 meter and be non-rotating.

I would also have liked to see a width limitation on signs, I fear that when ads can't be built in height they will be made wider instead, so the roadsides might look like the sides of a football play field, with 8 meter high wide signs changing content every 15 second. Nothing in the rules to hinder that kind of animations. I predict we will see a lot of 4x4 being converted to 4x16, or 4x32, or ever wider.

But these are minor concerns, I guess we should wait and see a bit for the rules to take effect. At least the ad tower across the road in Big M will have to be made smaller: September 31th 11:59 I will have my finger on the mouse ready to send that abuse report if needed (although to be fair, that one is far from the worst examples of ads around....)

I was thinking about that too but the mainland is a fairly big place - about 5000 regions, per a semi-recent post from Jack - and one person/group isn't going to make a whole lot of L$ from 50 ads.

I'm not sure it's perfect. Or, rather, I'm pretty sure it's not perfect, but I think it's a great step in the right direction. If LL sticks with this (being fed up with ad farmer antics), the mainland may be a much nicer place in a month or 3.

In any free marked, if there is a shortage of something, the price will raise. If the number of ad locations are substantially lowered, lets say down to 10% of what it was, the ad farmers will be able to rise prices to make even 50 locations valuable. That is: IF such forms of advertising is efficient.

The end result is however that we may see higher quality expensive ads for more expensive goods. But of course hard to predict

Thanks, Jack for listening to us. Now, if you can ban those who are the worst offenders. They are going to deliberately skirt the rules because they want to irritate people.
However, I am curious. If I am reading it right, you can only have 50 ads (basically cubes or signs) on 50 plots on 50 different regions max (ie one per plot per region)
What about 50 people joining a group where they each chose to do this? And what about the Kitten, star eyed smiley and picture towers, are these acceptable now. (I mean a ad tower group now with pics of lolcats and smileys)

And to everyone in the Houston Metro area and Port Arthur, when you see this, I am still praying for you. If you have Iphone, be safe.

So When will the cleanup of the mess thats out there now begin? And how can we help you with locations that we want boards removed from that have been there( some for years now)?

Based on Jack's reply, October 1st still seems to be the deadline. Then once the policies go into effect, do the same as you would with any other ToS violation.

I think that 50 is a too wide number! I suggest the max number of advertising locations fall into with the max number of groups that a single individual can own.
Like this, if Linden accepts to increase the max number of advertising locations, Linden must increase the max number of groups.
This will be a FAIR compensation.

That is one hell of a step down from your original posting, but I suppose it does give some indications of what you are hoping to do in an attempt to control ad farms and extortion.

The best of luck to you in your efforts; but this watered down version looks more like words rather than action (as usual).